Guide to watching long-ass shows on NetFlix?

I missed B5 in initial broadcast. Watched the pilot, but the big hair & eastern bloc proxy accents and ST-style "forehead-makeup-aliens" drove me nuts.

But I decided to watch it some years later in the first run of daily syndication, on a tivo. That burned through it in a reasonable amount of time and kept things moving. But it kept the number of episodes per sitting limited. Which probably cut down on burn-out. It also wasn't a death march; the eps just waited until I felt like watching them (a lot like Netflix streaming should).

Watching it with fresh eyes, in the above format, yea it was all of the negatives folks mentioned. But I was really impressed with the clear visibility of the story arc across the range of the series.

And I particularly enjoyed the way that things wound down, _properly_. As contrasted, say with a Dollhouse, which though I enjoyed it, was jammed together so quickly that entire characters fell off the table and did 180s in the trailing episodes. Or a BSG that pulled the ending right out of their ass.

Maybe B5 was a bit of an abberation, with free-er reigns than most. There haven't been many series I can recall that successfully naviagated start to finish so largely intact to the vision, without highly visible rewrites and fundamental shifts solely serving the network. Hell, these days its a miracle if a genre series even completes more than a single season, let alone a coherent primary story arc.

I guess that's one of the benefits of the limited-run UK run series (Jekyll etc): they get it all done in the time they planned, without leaving the end up to corporate nitwits. Maybe we'd all be better off and happier with more mini-series and fewer Defying Gravity's or Jericho's.

Anyway, I enjoyed B5, and found that it held up well, the last time I saw it. I don't think I've really seen anything in the time since that fundamentally raised the bar in such a way as to make B5 unwatchable. Bog knows I've seen a lot of unwatchable in the intervening years.

Granted, I wasn't following the 'fan' or 'taste-maker' sites on the series when I watched it. And I wasn't trying to piece together grand opinions on the plot from ep to ep. I just took it at face value and enjoyed it for what it was.

In the last few years I have rewatched Babylon 5 seasons 1-4 (well replacing the last episode of 4 with the last episode of 5) and thought it held up ok, but then I was mainly interested in the intrigue and politics and that is still decent.

This year my wife and I rewatched TNG seasons 3-7, and it didn't ever feel like a chore. I thought 6 was one of the better seasons (3,4 and 7 are watchable, but 5 and 6 are great). Avoid 1 and 2 unless you really want to, but they are generally quite bad. There were a couple of episodes we skipped if we didn't like the first 10 minutes (they tended to be Riker and Deanna episodes).

I recently downloaded season 5 of DS9 to show my kids the episode revsiting the TOS Tribble episode, and but we watched all and loved it and will get more soon. With DS9 you do need to watch the pilot and then skip to half way through the second season when the Marquis are introduced. It flows quite well from there with minimal bad episodes. Its my favourite of the Star Trek shows as it doesn't have as many annoying characters (Kirk, Chekov, Riker, Troi, Crushers 1 and 2, Neelix, Kes, Paris) and has the best captain of all 5 series (Kirk is an egomaniac, Picard cares more about crew than resolving situations, and Janaway is just a touch bland).

I seriously adored B5 at the time. And still have fond memories of it.

We started early in Season 2, when a friend made us watch a couple of episodes. We went back to start form the beginning, and were stunned at home clumsy the early Season 1 episodes were. The Amiga just couldn't quite pull off the graphics, makeup and acting were terrible.

The story arc was pure space opera, but no one was doing anything that complete at the time in an SF series. And the characters were cliche and over the top, but quite memorable, and fell nicely into the entire mix.

The other big thing is that it is kind of a rare S/F series that wasn't Star Trek. The whole Federation thing always irked me just a bit.

It's funny, because now the utopian ideal of humanity and the Federation look positively unique to me when I watch TNG or original series. All recent sci-fi has such a dystopian view of the human race and the future, it's interesting to see a utopian take.

Series 1 of Babylon 5 is pretty ordinary, because Captain Eyebrows is so wooden (nice voice but that is it). Once he gets replaced by Captain Tron the series really picks up. I would say to skip it, but so much is established in it for later seasons that it is unfortunately necessary.

Gary Sax wrote: It's funny, because now the utopian ideal of humanity and the Federation look positively unique to me when I watch TNG or original series.

Utopian ideal extends to essentially having a limitless power supply and the ability to convert energy into anything anybody wants in short order. From an economic perspective the Federation makes no sense, and I always found myself thinking that when I watched.

Need vaccines? Zap them into creation and beam them to whatever planet is dying. Problem solved! Need a few bucks to spend the weekend on Eroticon 6? Zap them up on the spot. Apparently the people that work there don't have a zapper of their own or they'd be guests themselves. They'd only need one because you could use it to zap up another zapper.

Now the people on Deep Space Nine -- apparently their zappers haven't arrived yet, because they have all sorts of issues to deal with. Would it kill the Federation to send just one zapper to Deep Space Nine?

S.